Author: andre_sberger

GIS Christmas calendar – day 3

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How do you share a location when that place doesn’t have an address? A grid with coordinates is an old and well working system, but coordinates are hard to remember in the head unless you write them down.

Now someone has come up with a new and interesting system called What3words. They have divided the earth into a grid of 3×3 meter squares and given each square 3 words that become the address of this square. One benefit of this is that also places in the world without a street address gets an address. It’s easy to say and remember 3 words, and with squares of 3x3m the addresses are more accurate than normal addresses. Now several map services support what3word addresses, like the Norwegian national mapping authorities map of Norway. I’m not sure if this will take off as a way to share a location, today it’s already relatively easy to share a map link to Google Maps or similar. And most smartphones for sale now has gps built in, so the exact location can be found. But still, an interesting idea.
Here is my location (the middle square of those that cover the small apartment I live in:

GIS Christmas calendar – day 2

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Google Earth Pro

Google Earth is nothing new, but did you know that Google Earth Pro now is free to anyone? In the pro version you can record videos of your “trips” around the world with the included film maker, print in high resolution for use in presentations or reports, and import GIS data like Tiff files or shapefiles.

On Wikipedia a GIS – geographical information system is defined as a “system designed to capture, store, manipulate, analyze, manage, and present all types of spatial or geographical data.” So by this definition even the standard version of Google Earth can be considered a GIS (if a simple one). But with the possibility to import GIS data as is possible with the pro version Google Earth becomes much more of a useful tool for gis/map work and presentation of data. The idea of being able to make a film where you fly to a location and see your work on top of the virtual globe is very appealing to me, as opening up ArcGIS to show someone a map or just some data is not particularly fast.

A simple example is something I did on the train the last time I was travelling by train. As I happened to have data on Norway from OpenStreetMap (downloaded from Geofabrik) I could import the railways into G.Earth Pro and see the track between the 3D mountains.

Railways Railways2

 

 

 

 

 

 

Click on the images to see them bigger

A small tip: I often use the shortcut “R” (just the letter r) while navigating in G. Earth. This shortcut resets the compass direction and viewing angle, so that the north again is up and the angle straight down on the terrain. It’s much easier and faster than changing the angle back with the navigation buttons or by dragging the map.

GIS Christmas 2015 – day 1

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The GIS Christmas calendar is back!
Two years ago I did a GIS Christmas calendar with a post every day until Christmas about GIS or maps. This year I will do the same, but be a little broader on the subjects of the posts, and also include posts about geography.  It will mostly be posts with links to things from my big bookmark archive, but also some personal work on some days.

As the climate meeting is happening in Paris this week I would like to start with a few beautiful tools to visualise global climate.

Earth

This is a visualization of global weather conditions forecast by supercomputers, with a lot of variables that can be changed by clicking on the earth button. As default it shows the wind at the surface, but many other layers can be turned on as overlays. One cool feature is the possibility to change to a different map projection.

Windyty

This second website is based on the above, but has a different and in my opinion simpler interface with a timeline and a location search box so that it is a little easier to find the weather conditions at your own location.

 

 

Displaying running tracklogs on an Openlayers map

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So, I have started running with the Zombies, Run! 5k training app which is excellent, and their own tracklog map is great, here’s an example. But they have the option of downloading the tracklogs as .gpx files, and that made me want a personal map to see all my tracklogs on the same map. And I wanted to add some of Stamen Design’s beautiful map designs. This is not very hard, but I still want to share how to do this in case someone wants a similar map.

Mapstyles2The different map styles I have for my map, from top left going clockwise: Stamen watercolour, Stamen toner, OpenStreetMap CycleMap and Mapnik (the normal Openstreetmap).

The OpenStreetMap wiki has a good article on how to make this kind of map, and my map is based on that code. So I will not go into the details on how to to make the html file. To get the Stamen layers in my map I found the necessary pieces of code here. If you look at the sourcecode of my map (right click, view sourcecode if you didn’t know how to find it) you will see the code  below (but not this nice looking, this is from the editor). I added the stamen layers before the OpenStreetMap layers since I wanted the watercolour to be the default layer of my map.

code1After adding the two Stamen layers I uploaded the .gpx tracks to my hosting area and gave them all a simple name (Run1, Run2, Run3 and so on). In the html file I then just had to link to each .gpx file and change the name of the file, like in this example:

Code2In this example, you see that I named the track April 1 2014 (this name shows up in the layer selection box) and changed the url to Run6.gpx. The .gpx files obviously have to be in the same folder as the html file for this to work. This piece of code was then copied for each tracklog and changed to fit each track. The style of each track can be changed by changing the style attributes (strokeColor, strokeWidth, strokeOpacity).

Tracklogs-layers

The layer selection box of the finished map.

The size of the map can be changed with the width and height code on the bottom of the html file. To make my map more personal I added a title and reused a css file I had. For this map the css file only gives the map page a coloured background and a black border around the map, but the html and css files can be changed to get many different styles, or more text around the map for explanations. Here the possibilities are endless. Happy mapping, and feel free to comment if you make yor own map, I always like to see maps and trips done by others.

Photo spheres

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One of my big interests is photography, and within photography I am interested in interesting ways to take and display photos, such as timelapse photography and panoramas. I have for some time wanted to make a 360 degree panorama, but as I didn’t want to put my photos on another online service I have put it off. Then last week I found this blog post that gave me exactly the code I wanted. So then on Saturday, when the sun was shining I went to the fortress in Trondheim and took a lot of pictures using a tripod. I took 5 rows of pictures, in a clockwise rotation, like this:

I tried using Hugin (and will look more into that program later) and Photoshop to stitch together all the pictures I had taken, but both took a lot of time and resources from my laptop. So I went for a program I have used in the past to make panoramas, Microsoft Image Composite Editor which automatically makes good panoramas. To make sure it would make a good spherical panorama I used the adjust tool to check the horizon in the panorama. (Click on the pictures to see them bigger.)

Here is the adjust button in Microsoft ICE.

The drop down menu (second picture) tells you which projection you’re using. The white lines are used to adjust the horizon in the panorama.     I then ended up with this picture:

stitch4

Using the code linked to in the blog post above (can be found here) I only had to upload the code and panorama to my hosting area and change the link in the html file to the name of my picture, and that’s it. Below is the result, which can be seen in fullscreen here. The fortress looks a little weird due to the stretching of the panorama.

I can see several applications for this kind of panorama, and will for sure make more of them. Google is a big user of this kind of panoramas, and have a page on how to make them and add them to Google maps. Their streetview pictures are made in a similar way to this. I think photospheres can be a nice addition to geotagged pictures in a map mashup, to allow people to see a place as if they were there themselves. This is not a new idea, panoramas made with Microsoft ICE can be uploaded to their Photosynth site, and can also be found on this map. But if you want a custom made solution, maybe with Openstreetmap as the background map, then this Photosphere code can be used.

GIS Christmas day 23 and 24

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EGEA_eventsClick on the image to get to the map

Today I have been completely away from the computer since I spent time decorating our Christmas tree, making gingerbread cookies and relaxing instead. So for the end of this Christmas calendar I give you a bigger post or both today and tomorrow. Also, I will probably not have much free time in front of the computer tomorrow. This time it’s a home made map again. Since I made the Schnappi map I have wanted to make a similar map for all the EGEA events I have been to. So the last days I have worked on this, and here it is, with colour-coded pins based on the type of event. Figuring out how to get different colours took most of the time on this project. I hope you like it. Merry Christmas!

GIS Christmas day 21

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Today I will link to another game. In the name GeoGuessr you will get placed at ronadom locations on the earth and then have to guess where you are based on the information you can find along the streets.  Having some language knowledge definitely helps in this game, and also having an idea on how the landscapes are at different places of the world.

There is a lot of fun things that can be done with Street View images, and one of them is making nice movies like the one below. Some clever people have made a tool that allows anyone to make short movies using Street View.

GIS Christmas day 19

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Now it’s only 5 days to Christmas, and I still have many things I want to do. One of them is making something nice for the last post in this series of posts. Hopefully I will be able to finish it in time.

Here’s a nice Christmas-themed map for those who use Twitter. It’s a map showing tweets tagged with #BestXmasEverMap. It’s made with one of the Esri story maps templates. I will tweet my hometown Trondheim to the map as I have spent most of my Christmases here. Add your town too!